I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m sick to death of listening to George W. Bush spruiking on and on about what a terrible threat Iran is in regard to it’s uranium enrichment program.

Threat to whom, I ask? Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Article IV, clause 1 of the treaty clearly states:

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

Inalienable right. Iran’s nuclear energy program, which has been start and stop since before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has pursued nuclear energy for peaceful, energy production purposes. In fact, over the past 28 years, the IAEA and German industrial company Kraftwerk, and most recently the government of the Russian Federation have all declared the Iranian light water reactors unsuitable for the purpose of nuclear weapons production. Reactor suitability aside, I find it extremely hypocritical of the US administration to continue its policy of diplomacy by derogation when it says and does nothing about nations like Japan, which has a uranium enrichment program for peaceful energy production purposes, including plutonium re-processing. Why then does the US administration not come out against Japan? Because Japan has US military forces resident on her soil? Can the same be said for France, Britain and the Netherlands? What about China, which has been re-processing uranium since she became a nuclear power decades ago?
The most recent clarification that this entire anti-Iranian crusade by George Bush, and doubtless that other Sith Lord, Dick Cheney, is completely and utterly baseless, came this week with the latest National Intelligence Estimate from the US intelligence community. It seems that good, reliable evidence exists that Iran may well have abandoned any pretence at a nuclear weapons program as far back as 2003. Well….bugger me! How about that, eh? But hey…..Iran is still dangerous, despite her inalienable right to pursue a peaceful nuclear energy program which involves uranium enrichment, as long as she doesn’t proliferate the technology.
This issue is ideology of the worst possible kind being enacted by a human being of the worst possible kind. The kind which believes that his deity has given him a task and that task is righteous. That he cannot be wrong because of that deity-delivered task, in fact, he just can’t be wrong. Period! The world is a dangerous enough place without idiots like George W. Bush doing his damnedest to make it even more so for righteousness sake. Thankfully, he’s forced to leave office in January 2009. If the obsequious nations of the world can resist his overtures to deny a sovereign nation her inalienable rights to a peaceful nuclear energy program at the risk of World War Three until then, we might all find 2009 brings some rational common-sense into the United States foreign policy pantheon.